I was thinking about the map colors the other night. They were annoying on a long night trip but I was did not turn the brightness down either. I was thinking a more red-based scheme at night (like an airplane cockpit) would be more suitable. Also I think there a 3 types of colorblindness, and it might be good to have a scheme for each one. There should be color studies available somewhere or consult your local eye doctor. I also discovered that deer were not marked on the map. Is there some way chips can be inserted in them to warn us late at night? They can ruin an otherwise wonderful trip.

Yeah I think map improvements are important too! A map and app has to look good to have mass appeal, but even more so from a functional perspective I am having a problem in Winnipeg that the basic Govt map data made the Primary Streets all Major Highways, not a big deal as I want to change them to Primary Streets but the problem is Primary Streets dont appear at a far enough zoom level.

To illustrate my example look at how the waze client looks on my phone for the city of Winnipeg. If I change all the major hwys to primary street, the average wazer would think there is a void inside of the ring hwy that encircles my city called the Perimeter Hwy. http://www.photoboothweb.com/image.php?id=0720tr876n7p

So basically I am hoping for primary streets to be more visible at further zooms so you can see the basic layout of the city using this important streets. I dont want to label these roads minor hwy or major hwy just to be visible (not that I have intentionally done so!).

I love the new cartouche color scheme, but the color intensity should be a few shades paler. The reds and blues and ramp greens overwhelm the traffic report colors and sometimes make it hard to read the road names.

Is it possible to create a small iPhone app to allow us to create our own colour schemes?

Once written, this could let the community spend the time developing colour schemes and leave the Waze team to work on the main Client. We could even have a way of uploading and sharing our own designs??

I like both options - on balance I think the yellow option is nicer, but it needs a little more difference between the shades per road type. It's always good to be able to spot the difference between motorways (freeways) and Major/Minor highways. Also you could still show the low traffic jams in a vivid (but strong) yellow rather than shades of orange.

I would certainly like to see both options on my iPhone client to try to live with them.

OK, I see some of your points but the way I understood it, Waze wants to eventually make money selling updated maps. If they spend their time courting the 90% (by your guess) of users that don't edit and just freeload, Waze will never get their maps into a marketable state and go bankrupt.

I think they need to put down the color crayons and fix the problems that are driving away the map editors. Sure there may be different teams of developers, but when there are so many obvious and frustrating problems they may have to reallocate the coloring team to the bug fixing team in order to create a viable product.

But then again, if you're happy with things they way they are, I may just be too picky and need to go somewhere else where they'll appreciate my months of hard work instead of pandering to the 0day n00bs by giving them new pretty colors and shiny road goodies.

Really? You don't get server timeouts when requesting a route? You don't have issues with segments folding back upon themselves when removing a junction? You don't have any segments in your area that appear to be connected but really aren't? Your dashboard routes are updated correctly every night? You don't experience any of a dozen other issues everyone else is complaining about? I'd like to know how you got the bug-free version so I can get it too!

sketch wrote:An attractive application is an application that is pleasant to use. No one wants to stare at an ugly map all day, and the more users that like it, the more users we have, and the better the maps get.

OK, but this application is a lot more than just staring at a map all day. It's supposed to be interactive an allow you to update the map problems. But when bugs and glitches prevent you from editing correctly, or make it too frustrating to do so, all those users that came because of the pretty maps will leave.

I'd prefer that you not waste time and resources making anything prettier until all of the numerous frustrating bugs, glitches, and errors have been fixed. Stop putting form ahead of function. If it doesn't work, it won't matter how it looks because no one will be looking at it.